Through the Ivory Gate

by Rita Dove

Pantheon Books, $21.00

Rita Dove, who after Gwendolyn Brooks was only the second African-American to win the Pulitzer prize in poetry, has attracted considerable attention with the publication of her first novel Through the Ivory Gate.

The book tells the story of Virginia King, a black woman in her twenties from a middle-class family in Akron, Ohio--Dove's hometown. Virginia returns to Akron as a visiting artist at an elementary school for a few weeks, during which she visits her grandmother and an estranged aunt.

The visit, which takes place during the mid-seventies, provokes flashbacks to Virginia's years growing up in the Midwest and Arizona. She also recalls her college years and her life on the road with a traveling puppeteers group.

Through the Ivory Gate flows well, painting a poignant picture of the life of a young woman who is learning to deal with life's surprises. Virginia learns that her college boyfriend Clayton is gay and comes finally to acknowledge his acceptance of his identity.

At the climax of the novel Virginia is told by her aunt the reason for her family's sudden uprooting to Arizona: Virginia's mother's discovery of her father's incestuous relationship with his sister.

By moving back and forth between Virginia's struggles and loves in the present and her formative experiences with her siblings and friends in the past, the novel depicts a complex character that keeps the reader riveted throughout the story line.

Each of these sections forms a separate story which could stand on its own, but is woven into a longer narrative by the presence of the interesting main character and her inner searchings.

Despite the accomplishment of Through the Ivory Gate, Dove has no intention of giving up poetry. She is currently a professor of creative writing at University of Virginia, and recently completed a historical drama in verse called The Darker Face of the Earth, due out in the fall of 1993. Dove is also halfway through a manuscript of poems.

Dove, who is reading excerpts from her novel at the Cambridge Public Library today, recently discussed her work with The Crimson.

Q: I hate questions like this. But how much of the book was related to your personal experience?

A: Well, you have to ask that question. There are things that make it seem like it's really truly autobiographical. It happens in Akron, Ohio where I grew up, and then Virginia goes to Arizona and I was in Arizona, although I was there about twenty years after her. She also plays the cello. I grew up playing the cello and I knew what I was talking about.

So there are these surface touch stones which were drawn from my own experience--like the cello and the description, certainly, of my home town--but I did it more for convenience sake than for any sort of autobiography. I don't think her character, in the way that she sees her crises, is anything like me. If anything, I think she's more like a composite of many black women that I grew up with--a kind of way of looking at the world which was prevalent in the '70s, which is different now.